SwiftKey released an early experimental version of its neural network-powered keyboard as a standalone alpha app late last year. At the time, we were pretty impressed with the quality of the predictions. Now, the company (which has since been acquired by Microsoft) has updated the main app with new neural network features.

A neural network is a system inspired by the functionality of biological brains. These systems consist of multiple layers that gather data from a large number of inputs and use those to generate likely outputs, often with much higher accuracy that you get from traditional rule-based programming. This allows the new SwiftKey to consider more context in your writing as it suggests words. The older N-gram model would only look at the last few entries, which often led to incorrect suggestions, even when personal data was added to the model.

You can get the updated SwiftKey app from the Play Store, and it's still free with optional in-app purchases for themes. Also be aware, the neural network predictions are only available for US and UK English settings right now. More languages will be added later.